skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I figure a math Ph.D. who's poked at Haskell and Django will be smart enough to figure things out, and enough of (the right kind of) programming is more about figuring out new environments than knowing an existing environment very well. The one thing I don't see in your writeup is any concrete experience to look at. Do you have some awesome Django site that does something nifty, or a cleverly-designed Haskell application, that you can show off? For bonus points, can you get real users?

The Stripe jobs page (http://stripe.com/jobs) has some programming challenges that are way too ambitious for a usual couple-hour coding challenge, but definitely along the lines of a nontrivial, self-directed project that I'd like to see. Spend some time over a weekend making something like that, and it'll be worth noting to everyone you apply to. I've also seen great websites explaining mathematical concepts in intuitive, interactive ways; maybe there's a paper or something you like that you can turn into an instructional webapp.

Since you've got a couple of years before you'll be applying, another great option is to get involved with some open-source software, preferably something you use already or would want to use.
i love the first thing ... adds so much perspective
Geo-Engineering
I think the barrier to entry to be "good" is fairly high, it just isn't artificial, like most barriers. There is no certification, money, or time barrier artificially constraining supply.

You need persistence, logical (not magical) thinking, willingness to learn a tremendous amount of material, and the ability to envision abstraction in order to become a programmer. These skills co-occur in only a limited portion of the population and of that, only a subset would be willing to live the programmer lifestyle (indoor, bad for extroverts, sedentary, not so high-status as being a Dr.)
I graduated with a Math Ph.D., and had little difficulty finding a job. Admittedly, I studied computational physics rather than Lie Algebras.

I wrote a blog post discussing how to leave academia and prepare for work in industry, you might find it helpful.

http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2012/leaving_academia.html
I always kind of thought of myself as Neutral Good. I'm not a believer in rules for their own sake, but the good that comes from ignoring a rule should outweigh the harm incurred by surreptitiously changing the rules on everyone else. The most pernicious harms caused by breaking rules are the ones that aren't obvious, but rather confer an advantage to the parties that broke the rule that the rest of society can't easily detect, until those unscrupulous first movers have managed to roll the advantage up into a competitive moat.

I'm only commenting because I think it's interesting to think about why we think the things we do. I think it's a weird that anyone would want to fit an AD&D alignment onto me. :)
Sure bitcoin is an interesting solution - but there is a problem with cost of all that busy work.
Google "What in the world are they Spraying"
It's not bleeding edge, just up to date. There are testing and stable repositories, but the stable packages are supposed to provide stable software rather than a stable system as a whole. You, as the user, are responsible for the stable system.
Explain it like I'm 5. Specifically, what "power" do white people have that black people lack?

Mostly it's not having to worry about certain problems, since they are out of your mind, one can forget about them. This is a great analogy to video games, "white people" is one of the lowest difficulty settings for Real Life™ ( http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/15/straight-white-male-th... )

For some examples of "things that usually easier for white people" (aka privilege) for white people, look at this list ('Daily effects of white privilege'): http://www.amptoons.com/blog/files/mcintosh.html
If you can program you can get a job. I think in your case you probably need to show you can do something by putting it up on the web or Github. PhDs from certain universities will probably get an automatic job offer regardless.

The question is do you want a job in your field of expertise? I am not familiar enough with companies looking at practical applications of abstract algebra but it's probably not as abundant as companies looking for people with a focus on statistics. I don't think this will hinder you much though as the industry is looking for smart people despite whatever field you're in.

Maybe this sounds stupid because it may be obvious but I think a big advantage is if you're able to both read math papers and translate them into actual working algorithms. It doesn't seem like there are many who know how to do both.
I think that it stands a better chance to get started on a local level. Not just with Git, can you imagine a MINT style presentation of city or township budgets? Only a handful of people provide input on budgets because of the difficulty of getting their minds around it. People complain how the money is spent or not spent after the fact. Radical transparency is the key.
There is no reason we can't start issuing tradable IOUs for bitcoins without actually having our hands on the bitcoins.

There could even be a billion bitcoin derivatives market with only a million real bitcoins (just moving around a thousand times each)
Also it makes it very hard to just leave apps up. Do I keep paying Apple every year just to give a free app away to people?
I guess that is the strategy they are playing, but I can't help thinking Spotify are going to be in a weak position no matter how large they are.

Fundamentally, the service they offer is not particularly difficult to replicate. They take music and stream it to users, supported by either advertising or a monthly subscription.

They act as a middle man that the big three record labels could easily cut out, and at the same time these labels can effectively pull the plug on Spotify at their convenience.

Without the music library, Spotify is nothing.
It's pretty clear that top preformers don't look at averages. They look at what others have done and from there figure out how to get there in a reasonable time.

A developer who makes 10x a regular developer happens often, but what they are doing is taking on a lot of the risk that companies take on and knock your salary for. Your project is 2x over budget and 4x behind schedule? Oh, that's just Software projects in corporate IT. This has nothing to do with the developer actually being better of course, but the developer willing to assume the risk that results in 10x payouts.

Instead of complaining about Stock Brokers, it might be more effective to look at what they do (transactional work) and try to figure out how to place your self in a position so that you can take advantage of transactional work.

And a minor correction, it should read: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need."
I think there is some karmic balancing going on here.

Zynga was great at marketing but I doubt that anyone that matters at Zynga has ever had an original thought about game play. If they can't buy the company that has the game idea they simply rip them off by copying game play almost down to the last detail.
but has anyone ever seen someone launch a "new Youtube"?

Google Videos ;)

I even had to google it to be sure of what it was called... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Videos

EDIT: Crap, google videos was launched before youtube...

I always saw google videos as a response to youtube, in my defence I was a bit disconnected that year.
You must not have looked at samsung's source for their recent flagship phones.
Awesome! I went to check out your blog post, only to discover that I've already read it (and it contains a lot of helpful advice, thanks!).
I'm going by what the article says (it said "doesn't work in IE"). I don't have a windows machine to test on myself.
Isn't that supposed to cool the planet. The other way round is called err, normal ?
The original description uses the value 12 because of the prior value of 2 hours, whereas you seem to just have N generals and no such hourly time from which to derive 12, plus this:

The existence of the 12-block chain is proof that a majority of them has participated in its creation.

Why is the existence of 12 verifications proof that a majority of N have participated?
Good job! I've been codifying lessons learned as I learn them and show them to be repeatable. The problem is that you don't know if it's a lesson vs. luck vs. something that happened once and won't happen again in that way in the future to draw a lesson from.

One lesson I have learned, however, is that largely hiring PR firms are a waste of money. Not sure that fits anywhere, but there you go.
author here: there's a cost with storing gold in the ground and securing it, and there's a cost with printing counterfeit-resistant paper and finding and jailing counterfeiters (and a cost with not doing so - unbounded inflation)

an interesting question then is: are the above costs greater than the cost of operating bitcoin? it might seem so at first, but don't be so sure and run the numbers on the back of an envelope.

also walk around downtown in SF and NYC and look at the amount of skyscrapers that are nothing but banks, scratch your head, and ask yourself what value they're actually adding.
Chuck Moore's GreenArrays chip? (He's also the guy behind Forth, the quintessential stack-based VM.) How's that working?
Atlastory, Inc. | Salt Lake City, UT | Full time

About: Atlastory visualizes history on a map, allowing users to explore the world through space and time. It’s like Google Maps with the ability to look 10, 50, or 1,000 years in the past. This is an application that has the potential to change the way people around the world learn history and interact with the past. This is a seed-stage startup with funding.

Job: this is an employee #1 position for a generalist back-end developer. You will be involved in developing most of the back-end to enable map rendering, data organization, and system buildout. You should be well versed in Ruby, Python, DevOps/AWS products, database design (SQL, MapReduce/Hadoop, etc.), HTML5/JS/front-end a plus. Most of all this set of problems requires someone who can learn as they go & figure things out that haven’t been done before. A few of the problems you'll be working on:

* PROBLEM: How to design a git-like system for collaboratively editing data that spans the history of the world.

* PROBLEM: How to organize a huge amount of GIS data so that it can be easily accessed, fed into an image renderer, backed-up, etc.

More details in the full posting here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bbbWWp7oPHcwbrqKlgJrp7i1...
Apple maps doesn't have 3D or turn by turn for me. That's because Apple decided go the planned obsolecence route and withhold those features from iPhone 4 owners. So now I have all the downsides of the new maps wih none of he benefits.
Can you recomend some good open source video editing software?
Take a machine learning class on coursera - you'll have a big leg up on the math. If you get the math, the algorithms are straightforward and the field is growing.
It feels like something the FTC should get involved with, false advertising.
I am trying let people login to a site hosted on/as a github pages site. A client side only site with authentication. A single javascript file the can add this feature to my projects. i'm trying to create a homomorphic authentication system where no server ever stores any data about the user. your data never leaves your client. user data gets stored within the client itself custom encrypted for each user by their username, password, and hash.

If I change the additions in my algorithm to multiplications I can avoid some issues others have pointed out.
yes, bitcoins in theory can be infinitely divided. classical observations about hoarding and "bad currency driving out the good" likely don't apply. if you want to spend, you just spend however little you want to spend.
MVC is open source now, so while there may not be official support from Microsoft, I would think bugs there will always be bug fixes as long as someone wants to maintain it.
Spray and pray politics?

Possibly more punning then I meant
You are exaggerating, OP has almost no experience in software development. And it is never that easy to get a job even if you are good. Nowadays it is more like 2-3 phone interviews, then a whole day series of face-to-face interviews, then HR interview if you are lucky. All of this takes up LOTS of time.
I'm a Maths MMath graduate and have got a software development job I am starting in November, so yes. E-Mail in profile if you want a chat.
> 2.16 Apps that download or install additional code or resources to add functionality or change their primary purpose will be rejected
because an attacker controlling less than 50% of the computational resources can be lucky and find the first solution before anyone else.

he can even be lucky twice or thrice. but to be lucky 12 times against everyone else with less than 50% of the resources, is statistically improbable.

2 hours is the result of those two values (12 being statistically relevant, and 10 minutes a chosen parameter of problem difficulty), not an input variable.
Im trying to work within the contraint of not really having a server beyond what github pages allows while still allowing secure authentication. The goal is to end up with a js file anyone can use to have a secure login system, and has been peer reviewed and verified to work.
despite my disdain for accreditations and certifications, I approve of the content of the exam. It looks like it covers a lot of ground, in a variety of subjects.
This has been our biggest blind spot. Until now.

We're been making great progress on it and 70% of Fab orders will ship within 1-5 days anywhere in the u.s. in Q4 2012.
I feel so bad for my friends who work at Zynga. They all talk about how the company isn't as bad as everyone makes it seem, and stock clawbacks are reasonable, and Pincus gets a bad rap. And then on Facebook, they all gleefully announce the release of Farmville 2.

Is that really the conversation you want to have whenever you talk about your livelihood? And do you want to be the only one spamming me about Farmville, because your company makes you, and because I have everyone else who ever did that turned off?
Interesting; I didn't know that. I also thought it was an answer to YouTube, but YouTube just grew faster.
I think anybody who needs smart people who can work with difficult domain problems will be happy to interview you. The chief worries with a PhD mathematician would be:

1. Will you take a pragmatic engineering approach when it's warranted, or will you be a cranky loner scribbling differential equations that supposedly prove which brace style is superior?

2. Will you be bored when you're not doing "real" math?

3. Will you demand a salary that exceeds your current ability to contribute?

Sounds like you are clear on all three counts. Now it's a matter of finding the right opportunities. If you want a job locally, meetups for topics like machine learning are a good place to find out where mathematically inclined programmers are working. (Though you might find that a lot of them are at meetups because they're bored at their current jobs.) If you're targeting a certain city, you can join local mailing lists for (e.g.) functional programming to which local employers might post job opportunities.

You can also check out job postings to see which high-tech companies are hiring programmers. A company that employs a lot of PhD scientists in other positions is more likely to hire PhDs into programming positions, if only for the sake of effective communication and a consistent culture. One of your biggest qualifications to work as a programmer in such an environment is that when the physicists or molecular biologists talk to you about the problems they're trying to solve, you are much better equipped to understand them and build good software for the company than a guy who didn't go beyond undergraduate linear algebra.

You're going to do fine. Finding your way into the right circles might be a slow process, though. Don't be afraid to take a boring job if you can't find a better one, because at least you'll get something to put on your resume, experience dealing with mundane crappy stuff that you might have avoided so far -- things like debugging, messy merge/rebase problems, and working with other people's retarded code. Good programmers have to be efficient at that stuff. Good programmers also have to be good at working with people, and the crappiest jobs have the most challenging people problems. It's better to be getting your hands dirty with that stuff than sitting at home sending out resumes and solving Project Euler problems. HOWEVER, don't lose faith that you are a highly valuable performer with rare capabilities even if that isn't true in the initial crappy jobs you find yourself in. Soon enough you'll find your way into the right companies, meet the right people, and you'll be fine.
Thanks, you don't see any concrete experience because there isn't anything worth showing. I'm working on some stuff right now to do just that. It's actually a webapp to allow teachers and students to communicate math effectively without having to know LaTeX and email pdfs.

From what I've heard so far, it sounds like there is definitely opportunities for me, and that means that I can justify spending time working on these types of projects over the next couple of years.
>Three years ago, a hobbyist could make an app in their free time, put it out there for cheap or free, and see what happened. If the app was any good, what would happen could easily be that they made a livable income off of their creation.

The huge customer base with credit card details stored already, one-click away from a purchase and with such low piracy rates as those the App Store offers was UNHEARD of before it.

And that's for the Mac App Store: for iPhone/iPad apps the market didn't even exist _at all_.

There's a reason developers jumped all over the App Stores. "Tooth pulling process"? You should have tried making a living off of shareware in the old times.

Also (2), why pay $99/year? You don't have to sign to the developer program to release stuff on your own. XCode can be downloaded for free IIRC, and there are tons of other IDEs you can use.

And (3), security preferences? Just right click "Open" and allow the app to run the first time. I really doubt "This looks sketchy to users" of that the "hobbyist is suspected of being a criminal".
Try to find a company full of like-minded people (maybe math/physics PhDs) and a job that is actually interesting to you. There will be no "overqualified" questions if interviewers understand you and your motivations well and you are enthusiastic about the job.

Experience is the best way to prove it though. If you have done well in a similar job no one will usually question your motivation.
I've been following MVC for a long time and I somehow completely missed the .mobile.cshtml feature! I can actually make use of this now. Thanks :)
> I don't think that is true, I think most people realize any jobs just like anything at all in life, won't be 100% fun stuff. It is just such an obvious common sense thing that they don't bother talking about it.

I disagree. People who are happy with their jobs realize this. People who switch aimlessly between jobs and careers definitely do not seem to realize it. They get fed up with dealing with people, or a crappy co-worker, or whatever else they don't like about their current job and leave, assuming that somewhere is a job that doesn't have to deal shitty thing "X", not admitting that most jobs will have shitty thing "X", and the ones that don't will have shitty thing "Y" instead.

On top of this, we get sentiments like the one from calinet6, telling people that if they simply accept that they need to work for a living, then their lives must sad. "Oh, you work as a programmer for money; how sad for you." Yes, how sad that someone can make a good living in a good industry.

How sad instead that so many people look for their life's meaning at work and never find it.
When one is creating a headline and one can choose between two words, using the one that isn't confusingly ambiguous is usually the better choice.
JavaOne 2012: Scala Tricks
It’s D-Day For Twitter’s Display Requirement Changes, and Nothing Happened
In addition to these excellent comments, my recommendation would be to hack up something: work on your fave idea, a fix to a pet peeve, contrib to an Open-source project and so on...You should get a pretty good idea of your strengths/weaknesses. There is no substitute for actually "doing it". It is also something you can point to in job interviews.

p.s This is a sellers market all through.
Currencies: The weak shall inherit the earth
Yeah, I meant clauses. Translation error.
And that's the problem: You, as a listener, think you're doing the noble thing by using spotify instead of pirating, but it really doesn't matter if those two are the only options you'd consider.

Of course you're on the legal site of music consumption now, but don't fool yourself into thinking that artists should be well off thanks to you.

Well known by now, but have a look at this infographic again: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/how-much-do-music...

I admit I'm a rdio subscriber and artist, but rdio, for me, just serves as a tastemaker, pre-listening source and mobile collection without limited space - everything I like, I buy elsewhere in lossless formats. Sadly, I guess that's a rather rare use of streaming services as people will often see them as a replacement to buying things they enjoy.
Sleep (literally) with a stranger for $76/hour an hour
The challenge then is to make money but appear to lose it, this appeases the music labels who think they are taking all the value off the table.

It seems we need a tech company that can do 'hollywood accounting' where they give the labels 40% of the 'net' and sadly there is no net.
Even from the comments and my own understanding is Bitcoin acts more like an asset. It be very tough to run an economic cycle using it. Imagine someone ordering a truckload of clothing and promising salaries to the workers but by the time it's ready, value of Bitcoin would go up, hence that person will receive less Bitcoins unless specified. The buyer i.e. holder of Bitcoin will always try to delay payment, so they will have to pay less amount.
Maybe for you. So maybe they should come up with an additional tier to grab some of your consumer surplus.

But for me? I compare it to the $30/year I pay Pandora. I have a Pandora app in my car, on my TV, on every phone and computer, etc. It's ubiquitous and the fact that I can't pick a specific song is meaningless to me. In fact, I like it much better. I can work and live my life and not have to spend a single second worrying about playlists and song selection.

Lately I've really liked the rebooted Songza.com -- it's curated playlists vs Pandora's algorithm-driven model. The playlists are great and the activity-centric UI is pretty awesome too.
For your first few question:
You can get signed nightly builds of ASP.NET MVC. Instructions are here: https://aspnetwebstack.codeplex.com/

Depending on the kind of support you're looking for, the discussions and issues on CodePlex may help as well. Otherwise, there's community support (often including ASP.NET team members) in the following places:
http://forums.asp.net/1146.aspx/1?MVC
http://stackoverflow.com/
http://jabbr.net/#/rooms/aspnetmvc

There are some other view engines available if you don't like Razor. Since you mentioned Django, I'm guessing you've looked at NDjango(http://ndjango.org/index.php?title=NDjango_Home). Another one I've been keeping an eye on is Parrot (http://thisisparrot.com/) - still in development, but I really like the syntax.

After that it got kinda ranty so not sure if I missed some other questions.
This Guy Will Never Accidentally Text the Wrong Person Ever Again